June 6 to July 11, 2020IT ONCE HAD A FACE,
NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAINJennet Thomas

Thursday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm

A video installation in which cloth and string, song and dance, costumes and goo collaborate to find new ways of moving in bleak time.

Two billion years from now, the oceans are beyond understanding, yet undersea karaoke may still be possible. The ghost of an oyster holds memories of what happened. Is there any chance of recovery? It sings to a scrap of cloth that fell to the bottom of the sea, trying to get a face.

Everything will be fine. All planes crash, all at once. Oxygen falls from the ceiling. But that’s not the right kind of mask, that’s a carnival mask…

Mud and cloth getting it together
Mud, and cloth, and string
There must be new unions
Rubbing against itself until it gets a face…

Jennet Thomas’s work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s film and live art scene in the 1990s. It now manifests in a variety of different forms: sculptural video installations, live performance and screenings at film festivals and museums such as Tate Britain and MOMA New York. She also makes objects and writing. Recent solo shows include: IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN, at Xero, Kline and Coma, London 2020; ANIMAL CONDENSED>> ANIMAL EXPANDED at Tintype, London, 2018; UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM>> TASTES LIKE CHICKEN, Block 336, London 2016; THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE at Grundy Art Gallery, 2015; SCHOOL OF CHANGE and All Suffering SOON TO END! both at Matt’s Gallery 2012 and 2010. Jennet Thomas is currently Reader in Time Based Media and Performance at University of the Arts, London. Many of her single screen films are distributed by Video Data Bank.

“Thomas’s critical skill lies in how her fablesfashioned, stream-of-consciousness-style, out of the detritus of pop-cultural neologismtie everyday experience, through their use of the bizarre, to far bigger political and philosophical questions.”  JJ Charlesworth, Art Review Magazine, 2018.